I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the Freehold Township schools who took part in New Jersey Community Water Watch’s Education Week 2003.
In particular, I would like to thank Randy Schlesinger of the Applegate School, Cathleen Rosen of the Catena School and Pat Eismann of the Eisenhower Middle School for acting as liaisons between me and their schools’ faculty and administration.
For those of you who are not familiar with New Jersey Community Water Watch, we are a project of NJPIRG and AmeriCorps, established in 1994.
We are a statewide service-based organization with chapters located on 15 college campuses throughout New Jersey.
Many of you may not know that New Jersey has the worst water quality in the nation. In fact, over 80 percent of our waterways are too polluted to fish or even swim in.
So what we do is educate and activate college students and members of their local communities to become stewards of their waterways, creating a grass-roots movement to improve our state’s water quality.
Every January we organize an Education Week in which all 15 campus organizers, along with student volunteers, travel to five cities in New Jersey, spending a day in each, educating children in grades K-8 on their local water quality issues.
This year Freehold was chosen as one of the sites, along with Camden, New Brunswick, Pater-son, and Newark. We toured the state, finding housing for all of us through friends, family and community groups, and receiving food donations from various grocery stores, bakeries and restaurants.
By the end of what was probably the most exhausting week of our lives, we had educated 3,300 children, a mark we could not have reached without the support of the Freehold Township schools.
So thank you again for all of your support. We greatly appreciate it!
Erica Scisco
NJ Community Water Watch
Brookdale Community College
campus organizer
Lincroft